O sovereign angel,
Wide-winged stranger
above a forgetful earth,
Care for me, care for me,
Keep me unaware of danger
And not regretful
And not forgetful
of my innocent birth.
O sovereign angel,
Wide-winged stranger
above a forgetful earth,
Care for me, care for me,
Keep me unaware of danger
And not regretful
And not forgetful
of my innocent birth.
Living with an awareness of the companioning presence of angels . . . we come to realize angelic joy is working with us, surprising us, and reminding us that we are loved beyond measure. Limit not the myriad ways your angelic companions may knock on the door of your heart. Spending time in the Silence draws them nigh.
I stood in the back corner watching them. They resembled three veterans who had met once more on a cold day after years of separation, and had lit a fire to warm themselves. I had pricked up my ears to overhear what they said, but none of them opened his mouth. You felt the air between them was vibrating and that a string of unspoken words was being unwound from mouth to mouth. Without the slightest doubt, this was how the angels spoke in heaven. How long did their silence last -- how many hours? It seemed to me time had come to a standstill, that one hour and one century were of the same length.
Make yourself familiar with the angels, and behold them frequently in spirit, for without being seen, they are present with you.
There is a medieval belief that angels want to sing to us. It makes them happy to do so. All we have to do is listen.
No one on earth could feel like this,
I'm thrown and overblown with bliss
There must be an angel
Playing with my heart.
Be not forgetful to entertain strangers: for thereby some have entertained angels unawares.
Know there are those who harken when we pray,
And succour from the realms of Light will send.
Ever at hand to guide us, or defend,
Till breaks at last the dawning of our Day.
If human beings knew that good and powerful beings were watching us, maybe we would stand up more erect and be more beautiful ourselves. We would be inspired to live up to our dignity.
It takes practice to spot angelic presences. But practice alone is not enough, unless one can practice being taken by surprise.
As James Maxton cemented and grouted the seven angels, he underwent a spiritual transformation. A diabetic, coming off drugs, James suffered pain and swelling in his feet. He could only work three hours a day. Once every hour, he would limp back to his house and bathe his feet in ice. It wasn't until he completed the icons that James saw the beauty of what he had created. "I got all choked up," he says. "For me it was a spiritual awakening, just looking at them, seeing the people all around looking at the angels, too. I like to say I was reborn in that garden. It was my personal resurrection."
Life is a tapestry: We are the warp; angels, the weft; God, the weaver. Only the Weaver sees the whole design.
On Thee the Angels look and are at peace; that is why they have perfect bliss. They never can lose their blessedness, for they never can lose Thee. They have no anxiety, no misgivings -- because they love the Creator.
We all have angels watching us . . .
What will bring their help?
Asking . . Giving thanks.
To evoke angels . . . we need only to live in quiet expectation of their presence and attune ourselves to their heedings. . . . From time to time, angels conceive and bring about serendipitous experiences and events in our lives to remind us that we are continually in God's care and that we are part of a divinely ordered universe.
Silence as a spiritual practice is much more than being able to sit still without talking for thirty minutes or longer. Instead, silence is a quality of presence. The silence we search for is an overall state of being. It is not something we achieve with great effort, either, but something we uncover that is inside us. Somewhere at our core there is a reservoir of silence. . . . To return regularly to this depth, whether in cloistered silence or in line at the grocery, is called "a habit of silence." It is not duration that is important, but the returning time after time to the source within us that, in time, shapes who we are.
We come to know the power of Silence
In deep meditation; here,
True Wisdom emerges silently,
Rising up from the Mystery
Of the unseen Source within all.
Silence is one of the major thresholds in the world. . . . Meister Eckhart said that there is nothing in the world that resembles God so much as silence. Silence is a great friend of the soul; it unveils the riches of solitude. It is very difficult to reach that quality of inner silence. You must make a space for it so that it may begin to work for you. In a certain sense, you do not need the whole armory and vocabulary of therapies, psychologies, or spiritual programs. If you have a trust in and an expectation of your own solitude, everything that you need to know will be revealed to you. These are some wonderful lines from the French poet Rene Char: "Intensity is silent, its image is not. I love everything that dazzles me and then accentuates the darkness within me." Here is an image of silence as the force that discloses hidden depth. Silence is the sister of the divine.
Silence brings us back to basics, to our senses, to our selves. It locates us. Without that return we can go so far away from our true natures that we end up, quite literally, beside ourselves. We live blindly and act thoughtlessly. We endanger the delicate balance which sustains our lives, our communities, and our planet.
Silence is the matrix from which word is born, the home to which word returns through understanding. Word (in contrast to chatter) does not break the silence.
In a genuine word, silence comes to word. In genuine understanding, word comes home into silence. For those who know only the world of words, silence is mere emptiness. But our silent heart knows the paradox: the emptiness of silence is inexhaustibly rich; all the words in the world are merely a trickle of its fullness.
each evening
is a softly
glowing
entrance
into
darkness
stillness
silence
May we all grow in grace and peace, and not neglect the silence that is printed in the center of our being. It will not fail us.
The water in a vessel is sparkling; the water in the sea is dark. The small truth has words which are clear; the great truth has great silence.
Lindbergh wrote more than fifty years ago, "Not knowing how to feed the spirit, we try to muffle its demands in distractions. Instead of stilling the center, the axis of the wheel, we add more centrifugal activities to our lives -- which tend to throw us off balance."
But our spirit has an instinct for silence. Every soul innately yearns for stillness, for a space, a garden where we can till, sow, reap, and rest, and by doing so come to a deeper sense of self and our place in the universe. Silence is not an absence but a presence. Not an emptiness but repletion. A filling up.
Unfortunately, in seeing ourselves as we truly are, not all that we see is beautiful and attractive. This is undoubtedly part of the reason we flee silence. We do not want to be confronted with our hypocrisy, our phoniness. We see how false and fragile is the false self we project. We have to go through this painful experience to come to our true self. It is a harrowing journey, a death to self -- the false self -- and no one wants to die. But it is the only path to life, to freedom, to peace, to true love. And it begins with silence. We cannot give ourselves in love if we do not know and possess ourselves. This is the great value of silence. It is the pathway to all we truly want.
Learn to get in touch with the silence within yourself, and know that everything in life has purpose. . . all events are blessings given to us to learn from.
A loving silence has far more power to heal than the most well-intentioned words.
Coming to the red-brick church, we slip inside to rest, reflect, and lay prayerful hands on our ailing bodies. The sanctuary is empty. We sidle into pews, remove our hats, gloves, coats. Silence. Yank off our shoes. Silence.
Unlike the silence of a library with its absence of noise, of outward distractions, its rules and kindly librarians who shhhh! at you, in the empty church the silence is different. It's all about presence. Presence you can't name for what it truly is, can't see, but you can feel, if you bring your heart across the threshold of the outside world. This church could as easily be a synagogue, mosque, or a temple. There you meet yourself, and that inexpressible mystery that lies beyond you. This presence requires reverence, not obedience. We kneel at the shrine with no donation to make but our prayers -- for things beyond words, prayers of the open heart. This silence is alive, making possible a change. Silence
The task of the peacemaker is to speak the truth, whether our culture wants to hear it or not. As we speak the truth in a spirit of love and peace, we will realize deeper levels of truth and begin to understand the great truth of human unity and God’s way of nonviolence. The pursuit of truth ultimately is the pursuit of God.
Luminous is the word of Truth; like
a laser beam, it cuts through
ignorance and illusion. . . .
Blessed are those who choose Truth.
Their path is made straight,
their spirit freed to soar.
Somebody once said that if you really seek the truth, whatever road you travel, sooner or later you come to God.
Trust that truth whether good or bad, pretty or ugly, is
still truth . . . the knowledge of anything true brings
freedom and empowerment back to oneself.
The word integrity has two meanings. The first is "honesty"... We have to be honest in facing our limitations, in facing the sheer complexity of the world, honest in facing criticism even of things which are deeply precious to us. But integrity also means wholeness, oneness, the desire for single vision, the refusal to split our minds into separate compartments where incompatible ideas are not allowed to come into contact. An undivided mind looks in the end for an undivided truth, a oneness at the heart of things. The whole intellectual quest, despite its fragmentation, despite its limitations and uncertainties, seems to presuppose that in the end we are all encountering a single reality, and a single truth.
Happy are those who, while possessing the truth, search more earnestly for it in order to renew it, deepen it, and transmit it to others. Happy also are those who, not having found truth, are working toward it with a sincere heart.
Let us humbly remember that absolute truth exists only
in the mind of God. We human beings are forever searching.
Truth is within ourselves; it takes no rise from
outward things, what e’er you may believe.
There is an inmost center in us all,
Where truth abides in fullness . . . and to know,
Rather consists in opening out a way
Whence the imprisoned splendor may escape,
Than in effecting entry for a light
supposed to be without.
In all ten directions of the universe,
there is only one truth.
When we see clearly,
the great teachings are the same.
What can ever be lost? What can be obtained?
If we attain something, it was there from
the beginning of time.
If we lost something,
it is hiding somewhere near us.
Truth is a shining goddess, always veiled, always distant,
never wholly approachable, but worthy of all the
devotion of which the human spirit is capable.
Whoever deeply searches out the truth and will not be deceived by paths untrue, shall turn unto himself his inward gaze, shall bring his wandering thoughts in circle home and teach his heart that what it seeks abroad, it holds in its own treasure chests within.
We are at liberty to be real or unreal, to be about truth or untruth. We really do have a choice. We are talking here about a felt knowledge, inner awareness, knowings that come out of the quiet, from a deep place within. Our truth is just ours. And we believe it is wise to be leery of anyone who [claims] to hold ALL truth -- even organizations, ministries, and leaders whose values we admire. A part of the journey into freedom is examining the truths upon which we have built our lives and discovering that we have choices about who we follow, where we put our time and money. And our choices, our truths, make us who we are.
When Henry wove a rug, he wove from the depths of his spirit and from the fullness of his heart, and with the careful eye of a focused mind.Directly across from his upright loom, at eye level on the concave wall of the hut, Henry had lettered a small sign for his own inspiration: BY THEIR WORKS YE SHALL KNOW THEM.And more, it was a reminder that his remission from consumption, he believed, had come as a consequence of work with his hands.Work for him was the very stuff of salvation and healing.For that reason, whenever he should write or type or spell the word "work" for any reason, he would use an uppercase "W" as its beginning.
To learn to concentrate without effort
and to transform work into play
I need to have and hold a zone of silence
in my soul.
The only ones among you who will be really happy are those who have sought and found how to serve.
If artistic creations emerge from our lives and the ways in which we see the world, then it seems useful to engage the workplace as a source of creative subject matter and energy.The job is the place where most of us spend time and expend effort each day.It is the world we inhabit, and I believe we can make it better and more satisfying through the conscious use of the creative process.. . . Our creations and our lives are enhanced when we realize that everything in our environment is a source for imagination.
If we open up to our vitality and to the sense of urgency that flows within us, we will have the pleasure of experiencing ourselves living and working in cooperation with the deepest forces of life.
It is not vast quantities of mechanical work that appeals to the Divine, but it is the link with the divine consciousness established through that work that matters.This consideration of the spirit in which the work is done is of the utmost relevance to all of us who want to progress toward divine consciousness.When one is conscious during work, that quality of consciousness is naturally imparted to what one is working with or upon.Such work retains the vibration of that person and they link others immediately with that cause.
If only he could work faster.Yet if he did work faster, how could he produce paintings grounded in deep beds of contemplation, the only way living things could be stilled long enough to understand them?And wasn't everything he painted--a breadbasket, a pitcher, a jewelry box, a copper pan--wasn’t it all living?